Antoine Levi gallery is pleased to present GUSTS, DRAUGHTS by Norwegian artist Olve Sande.
This new series of works results from Sande's ongoing research on building materials and, here specifically, on the wind barrier, a membrane habitually used in construction yards that is hastily cut out to be replaced by a window pane.
The gesture of the cut-outs is precisely at the origin of a definition of pictorial action's new areas where, indeed, the pigment applied at the back of the cut-out patches emerges as a shadow; the wind barrier acts in this way as a sort of veil, causing the solid images to become distorted as if looking through a fogged window.

At the 2016 edition of the Paris FIAC Art Fair, Applicat-Prazan will be presenting the historical and
eternal, monumental and timeless work of Zoran Music (1909-2005). Born in Gorizia (Frioul) in 1909, Zoran Music was deported to Dachau in 1944 because he was a resistant. At the risk of his life, he drew 200 sketches which described what he saw there: scenes of hangings, crematorium ovens, piles of corpses, that is to say, the inconceivable. Many years after his return, in the 1970’s, the artist painted a series of works entitled “We are not the last” in which he depicts the horror of the camps in the silence of the unspeakable. Zoran Music died on the 25th May 2005 in Venice. His paintings are held in most of the great museums the world over.

Composed of 17 paintings, this exhibition brings to light two series of his works which fascinate the
gallery. “We are not the last” consists of 10 acrylic paintings on canvas executed between 1970 and
1974, and his major later works of the 1990’s, in which he reveals his inner realm, approaching his
own end.

On this occasion, Applicat-Prazan and the publisher Skira have co-edited a magnificent catalogue
created by Communic’Art, in which three authors pay tribute to the work of Zoran Music, each
expressing themselves freely in their own manner. After contemplating the paintings, Boualem Sansal, Pascal Bruckner and Michaël Prazan have composed vibrant texts on the life and work of Zoran Music. Each, in his own style, with his personal sensitivity, has written a text addressing
the themes of life, death, the monumentality of this work, human tragedy, History and the issue of the duty of remembrance. Each of the authors concludes with references to contemporary barbarity and the tragedy of current events.

From the 28th October to 10th December 2016, Art : Concept will be pleased to present Plot Twist, its third solo exhibition with Geert Goiris (Bornem, 1971). Giving an entirely new direction to his work, for the first time the artist proposes a confrontation between photographs and videos.

The term “plot twist” refers to a rebound, a new development occurring unexpectedly within a plot. In the mysterious narrative created by the Belgian photographer, it corresponds to the emergence of moving images that have started to shake a work previously dominated by still images. Beyond photography but not quite films, these three videos (between one and two minutes) fit with extreme coherence into the practice of Geert Goiris. As often, his subject is a micro phenomenon, part of the natural order taking place in our absence; a makeshift locomotive going from point A to point B, a stretch of water covered with ice and a mountainous landscape invaded by a wave of smoke. Even though the medium changes, the relationship with image and the information it conveys remains the same. Again, there are no specifications of time or place. All the elements necessary to our understanding are perceptible (the subject is realistic, perfectly recognizable) but elusive enough to leave room for interpretation. The uniqueness of the video intervenes at this point: incorporating the viewer even more into the process.

The exhibition as a whole seems to follow a voluntarily open narrative construction. Despite some clues that could lead to the construction of a scenario not devoid of eschatological echoes - a surgical mask, a packedup car undergoing an undeniable mutation, a mirror without reflection - the purpose is not the disappearance of what is human, on the contrary. In a speech in the negative (in the philosophical sense of the term), this apparent absence just ends up signifying with force, strangeness and even violence, our presence in the world. By almost empirically picking out - in a relatively objective manner - fragments of what is happening without us, the artist reintegrates humans and assigns a different role to them; to fill the gaps, to participate in building a common history whose outcomes are infinite.

Julia Mossé / translation Frieda Schumann

Born in Bornem (Belgium) in 1971, Geert Goiris lives and works in Antwerp. His work is present in many institutions such as the Seattle Art Museum, the Kunsthalle in Hamburg, the Antwerp Museum of Photography and the Museum of Modern Art of the City of Paris. Recently, several exhibitions were devoted to him: Fight or Flight in Frac Haute Normandie, Unfathomable at Belfast Exposed and Flashbulb Memories, Ash Grey Prophecies at Foam Fotografiemuseum in Amsterdam.

The works in Saigon Immolation evoke, compare, and reenact historical events as a way of positioning the identities of artist and viewer.

William Kaminski’s and Becca Lieb’s videos appropriate footage in which emotions are indirectly expressed. Lieb and Kaminski triangulate their own identities through their vicarious experiences of the identities figured in their works. Kaminski’s Interview ‘94, 2015, is an animation of a video with former Red Hot Chili Peppers guitarist John Frusciante in which he obliquely defends his long-term heroin use. The animation composites the appropriated video with still photographs in which the artist recreates, frame by frame, Frusciante’s every pose. Lieb’s video, Panopticon of Pleasure, 2015, superimposes Bas Jan Ader’s 1971 video, I’m too sad to tell you, with Meg Ryan’s performance of a fake orgasm in the 1989 rom-com, When Harry Met Sally.

David Muenzer’s Sconces, 2013-ongoing, are illuminated sculptures resembling folded paper. The watermark on each Sconce incorporates motifs from the only-just-past: an avatar employed by Edward Snowden, or the 2015 common application essay questions, used for admissions to American universities. Sowon Kwon and Jeffrey Stuker evoke events with more distance. Kwon’s series of drawings, dongghab, 2003-ongoing, takes its title from the Korean concept of a social relation determined by the year of one’s birth. Each drawing’s title refers to a place, while each drawing’s text specifies an event that took place in 1963. Stuker’s My Metal Gullet, 2016, is an animation that depicts the LIP R148, the first European electronic watch, while describing the 1973 worker’s revolt in the factory where the watch was made.

Stuker’s description of his own artistic practice speaks to the exhibition as a whole: to connect—impossibly, enticingly—histories that in reality are always partial.

Artist Bios:

William Kaminski (b. 1982, Pennsylvania, USA) lives and works in Los Angeles. Recent solo exhibitions include Kurt Cobain Visitation Nightmare, Redling Fine Art; Esper, Phil Gallery; and Low Pressure (Kurt & Billy) at Ms Barbers in Los Angeles. In 2015 he opened a live haunted house, Kurt Cobain Haunted Heck. From 2009 to 2013 he co-directed the artist space Control Room in Downtown Los Angeles. He received his BFA from Art Center College of Art and Design in 2009 and his MFA from UCLA in 2012.

Sowon Kwon (b. 1963 Seoul, Korea) works in a range of media including sculptural and video installations, digital animation, drawing, printmaking, and artist books. Kwon holds a BA from UC Berkeley, an MFA from Pratt, and attended the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program in 1991. She has had solo exhibitions at The Kitchen in New York City, Matrix Gallery/Berkeley Art Museum, and the Whitney Museum of American Art at Philip Morris (now Altria). Her work has also been featured in numerous group exhibitions including at at The New Museum, The ICA Boston, MOCA Los Angeles, The Queens Museum, The Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, Artist Space, The Drawing Center, Artsonje Center in Seoul, Korea, the Gwangju Biennale, the Yokohama Triennale in Japan, and San Art in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. She is a recipient of fellowships from The New York Foundation for the Arts in Sculpture, The Wexner Center for the Arts in Media Arts, and The Asian Cultural Council.

Becca Lieb (b. 1988, New York, USA) is a Los Angeles based artist and poet. Recent exhibitions include tl;dr at Artspace, Auckland, curated by Michael Ned Holte, and neverhitsend at 356 Mission Road in Los Angeles. Recent performances include Wine House at Chin’s Push and After the Rise and Fall of the Teenager (with Patrick Ballard), at MaRS in Los Angeles. She was a 2015 Rema Hort Mann Foundation Emerging Artist Grant nominee, and a 2015 Rema Hort Mann Foundation YOYOYO Grant recipient. Lieb graduated with a BA from Yale University in 2010 and received her MFA in Art from California Institute of the Arts in 2014.

David Muenzer (b. 1987, Pennsylvania, USA) lives and works in Los Angeles. Recent exhibitions include Essai at Lord Ludd Philadelphia and Scalar-Daemon at Reserve Ames in Los Angeles. Group exhibitions include neverhitsend at 356 Mission Road and Ark: A Festival for Animals at the Fortezza Franzenfeste in Bolzano, Italy. In 2011, he organized 14 & 15, an experimental exhibition on two floors of the Lipstick Building in New York City. He received his BA from Yale University in 2009 and his MFA from the University of Southern California in 2014.

Jeffrey Stuker (b. 1979, Colorado, USA) is an artist and writer about art under various insignia, both fictional and actual. He is the fashion editor at Art Handler and the director of the SEELD Library, Los Angeles branch. Recent exhibitions include This Lantern Lacks a Candle at Full Haus, Los Angeles; To Capture What The Bird Has Already at Sushi Gallery, New York; and What Lies Hidden Behind the Electronic Lip? at Hunter/Whitfield, London. He received a BFA from Tufts University and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, in 2002, and an MFA from Yale School of Art in 2005.

Balice Hertling is pleased to announce Louisa, an exhibition of works by Buck Ellison. The exhibition will run from November 5th to January 7th with an opening reception on November 5th from 7-9 P.M. The show consists of seven framed photographs, two landscapes and five portraits.

When I was fourteen, I went to Paris for the first time. I spent most of my time with my sister shopping for jeans and eating frozen yogurt, until our dad actually cried, saying he had taken us to Europe to “experience art.”

When I was fifteen, I went to Nice to study French. This was a summer of firsts: first menthol cigarette, first application of tanning oil, first Lacoste polo shirt (size 4, light yellow). I was so impressed by the girls I met there; girls from schools called Chapin, Nightingale, Spence, girls who breezed into the quad with new Longchamps after morning lessons, girls who had an answer for everything. They seemed so urbane and worldly. There was something in the casual way they related to luxury that fascinated me - and still does. It was the first time I felt that strange mix of attraction and repulsion that motivates so much of my work.

Mornings we spent conjugating the stolid verbs of ancient French, but in the afternoon we went to the market. One afternoon, we stopped at the stand of an old madame who sold tribal jewelry. My friend Louisa held up a pair of wooden earrings with parrots on them and turned to the woman. In perfect schooled French, she said:

“Vos boucles d’oreilles sont très jolie.”

-Buck Ellison

Buck Ellison (b. 1987, San Francisco), lives and works in Los Angeles. He graduated from the Städelschule, Frankfurt in 2014 and took his B.A. in German Literature from Columbia University in 2010.

The Galerie Bernard Bouche is pleased to annonce the exhibition of paintings by Pol Pierart starting from December 3.

« If there is an artist who will never change the path he was determined to follow, without giving into the trend, it is Pol Pierart. Apart and almost in secret, he keeps his work constant and coherent. And what is unpredictable is that his work continues to retain our attention and change the way we see things. Indeed, it puts an end to the triumph of display. Throughout his exhibitions, we are still captivated by the small discoveries of a man who, without being fond of speaking in public, plays cleverly with words using irony and understatements. The artist says that his paintings allow him to go directly to the essential, they allow him to capture the physical presence of the word. Thus, in contrast to his photographie that attracts attention by modes of association endowed with a meaning and by staging aphorisms and other games of language, the canvases surprise with a great economy of means and with a rhythmic syntax limited to a single word. In the fresh colour the painter quickly traces regular letters that compose an apparently insignificant term. Those who know a little bit the artist do not ignore the continuation: by the game of strike-off, superimposed lines, and doctored letters, the initially written word takes on a new meaning and stimulates to all kinds of readings, excursions and detours. Like comets, the letters wiggle in our thoughts. They go fast, they just touch, and, without bothering about aesthetics or technical virtuosity, they go hand in hand with the ironie of the delivered message. If the exercise of style gets us ready to smile, behind the apparent lightness there are, however, the semantic interferences, a gravity that admits to being just something fairly disturbing. It may be something like a deletion of a letter, a barely noticeable erasure or, suddenly, the reversal of a meaning that operates the doctored letters. Even if it doesn’t seem like it, the artist takes a visitor by a sleeve to make him/her think. (...)

Forever crossed by desire and dissatisfaction, his paintings vibrate with a flowing gesture and a material that unites the word and the colour. In fact, we do not talk too much about the colour. Yet, it is a major concern of Pol Pierart. The colour is the matrix of the word which arises, it is the trace of the physical experience of the painter. Full of nuances, it guarantees, along with the variations of features and the imperfect spelling, the aspect of incompleteness of his work. Receding from the pure colour, the artist chooses valuable gradients and shades of the past, almost transparent. (...)

Pledged to the desorder of feelings and infinite semantic orchestrations, the painting of Pol Pierart is decidedly unclassifiable, and that is without a doubt the reason why it resists with no difficulty the secure revenues, the ephemeral success and fashion."

Extract of the text on Pol Pierart by Julie Bawin (issue N34 of the « L’art même », 2007).

It begins with her back to us and it will end—I might as well tell you now—in a full frontal confrontation. This time, entering the proscenium of the gallery is done with the same embrace of risk and responsibility as when one enters the theater of war. That is, with rules on the verge of being shed and codes of conduct inevitably eroding. But I am getting ahead of myself; that is not where we are now.

You entered the courtyard and found yourself behind an androgynous figure, facing away, standing tall. The edges of the painted image are frayed; the depiction sits unevenly within the canvas. As the paint flirts with its surrounding structural edges, you can't help but think that there are an infinite amount of points between the end of the stroke and its frame, and that if, as in Zeno's paradox, the two cannot possibly meet, there can never really be impact, nor finality, nor death. As you look at the braided figure embedded in this “infinite” plane of the painting, it comes to mind that the canvas is rough, arid and scaling. The paint sits on it, thirsty and aggravated. It exudes hotheaded urgency through its materials while depicting cool calm in its imagery—a contradiction for you to store away. The figure, unaware and uninterested in your gaze, looks out toward a blurry, watery color field. Light seems to emanate from within the painting, not from without. It is radiating something like heat. And so it begins.

ACT II (a battleground amongst many):

When you turn the corner you find yourself in a room with unsettling and uneven walls. You've heard from soldiers that war is a slow animal, usually composed of long periods of waiting with short, albeit violent, bursts of activity. This particular battlefield illustrates this well. It is deceivingly calm, restrained; it seems organized and paced. A handful of paintings sit on disproportionate walls, facing you with confidence. The landscape is gendered now: faces of women, each wearing her own distinct psyche and state of mind, are accessorized with smudged makeup, like war paint; challenging a traditional sense of beautiful with a little bit of the hysterical, the unhinged. These faces, inspired by magazines and then painted from the imagination, are engaged, engaging. Then, in sequence, in cause and effect, the larger canvases reveal a seated figure on the verge of a large landscape; a woman walking at dusk; an armored horse with its powerful knight and finally, a standing figure, literally larger than life, towering over a meddle of spears and soldiers in battle.

The stances of war, as well as their representations, have assumed innumerable forms across eras and geographies. This particular sequence of paintings quotes from, and draw affinities between a sampling of styles such as Jean-François Millet's raw representation of peasant life, the symbol-infused landscapes of traditional Chinese paintings and perhaps most obviously, Paolo Ucello's infamous Battle of San Romano.

The latter, a triptych in which each part is integral to understanding the whole, enacts a precipitated sequence of events amidst the political entanglements of a war. Each of CLAIRE TABOURET's paintings displays a fragment of this, her version of the story, rich with the quotidian experience of each of its characters.

If I were to guide you through the exhibition, we would end up in front of the namesake painting of the show. Battleground is a smooth canvas with complicated skies. A giant woman, superhero-like, struts defiantly in an outfit reminiscent of leather dominatrix gear as much as of medieval armor: Jeanne D'ARC, Michelle PFEIFFER and Grace JONES. At her stiletto heels, horse(wo)men bolt forward, kicking up dust. She stands and makes eye contact, silently embodying all of the other women who watched us walk through the galleries. She is the quintessential multifaceted psyche, a Rorschach test; reading her is reading you.

ACT III (the fourth wall and the language of war):

There is one more room I want to show you. It is a backstage of sorts, a key for the paintings, a reveal. This final room of the show exhibits 23 monotype prints hanging evenly at eye level in the safety of frames. As you walk by them you start to decode a pattern, a rhythm. Characters, shapes and colors appear repeatedly in the prints like a game of linguistic and visual associations. I refer to them as a key because they turn the characters of the exhibition, whether primary or secondary (e.g., the horse(wo)men or the landscape), into symbols of a new vocabulary. Together, they allow you to read the rest of the exhibition, which is itself a kind of syntax and subsequent anthem. In this backstage, the components are revealed, baring the device, without beginning or end, as a circular passage of time; an endless loop of conflicts and ceasefires.

An epilogue (and the stakes):

Discipline, consistency and obedience are driving principals akin to both the military and the practice of painter Agnes MARTIN. In fact, the two figures in this body of work looking away from you, reader, are portraits of MARTIN (who, it must be noted, would say that she painted with her “back to the world”). While famous for her restrained palette, systematic use of lines and sublime mastery of light, MARTIN's life was solitary; she opted to maintain a position in the margins for much of her career. Solitude, be it temporary or sustained, has often been perceived as an illness, she wrote[1], especially in women, but in her experience it was a quality that lead to rigor, dedication and artistic integrity. MARTIN painted with ardor and command, questioned traditional forms of authority and utilized the dry landscape of the desert as a vantage point to a world of her own.

Each of CLAIRE TABOURET's exhibitions builds on the last, like a thought delivered through stream of consciousness, undeterred by contradictions, playing both argument and counterargument against one another. Push and pull. Her last exhibition, Les Débutantes, consisted of crowds of adolescent characters gathering in each painting and looking forward toward a middle ground. You, viewer, were surrounded. Now mature, the faces of this body of work stand solitary, calm, claiming space with confidence using the white walls as pauses to amplify the magnetic intensity of the canvas's contents. They bleed the kind of powerful, pleasurable, provocative sensation of freedom promised in certain forms of restraint, of domination.

Lauren Mackler

[1] “We have been very strenuously conditioned against solitude. To be alone is considered to be a grievous and dangerous condition…. I suggest that people who like to be alone, who walk alone will perhaps be serious workers in the art field.”, Agnes MARTIN: Writings, edited by Dieter Schwarz (Stuttgart: Hatje Cantz, 2005).

Cahiers d'Art is pleased to present the exhibition of new works by Adel Abdessemed in our gallery space at 14, rue du Dragon, Paris 6th, which will be open until January 28, 2017. The exhibition will show three new editions by Adel Abdessemed published by Cahiers d'Art as well as one original drawing.

Cahiers d’Art opens an exhibition of Adel Abdessemed to coincide with the 2016 edition of the FIAC.

The work of Adel Abdessemed (born 1971) navigates between free drawing, a dialogue with poetry, and an engagement through forms with the challenges of our world. The many institutions where his work has been exhibited include the 2007 Lyon Biennale, the Havana Biennale, the São Paulo Biennale, three Venice Biennales (1997, 2003, and 2015). He has had exhibitions at the PS1/MoMA, the MIT List Art Center, and the French Musée National d’Art Moderne – Centre Georges Pompidou. In 2015, his piece Nymphéas shared the opening room of Okwui Enwezor’s Venice Biennale with Bruce Nauman. In 2016, he was invited to the Avignon Festival with the exhibition and publication Surfaces. And the same year, his piece Bristow was commissioned by Bold Tendencies in London; it is also due to become a book to be edited by Hannah Barry, Donatien Grau and Hans Ulrich Obrist. A three-volume survey entitled Works, published by Walther König, also appeared in 2016, with contributions by eminent thinkers and theoreticians. In October he took part in the Miracle Marathon at the Serpentine Galleries, in conversation with Edna O’Brien.

For his exhibition entitled ‘Politics of Drawing’ at Cahiers d’Art, Adel Abdessemed has created three editions: Hibou (‘Owl’), Cerf (‘Stag’), and Pigeon. These works – Hibou, an edition of eighteen, and Cerf and Pigeon, both editions of three – begin with the image of these animals which Abdessemed describes as ‘distant brothers’. After transferring them onto the paper with charcoal, he transforms them again through the printing process. They play on the effect of scale, going from over two metres (Cerf and Pigeon) to Hibou, which is over a metre high. They all share the space of the gallery in the rue du Dragon. As Abdessemed said about Cerf, ‘I think I have met the stag in the depths of the night while walking in the forest…’ We find ourselves here in the middle of what he calls ‘inevitable presences, represented without any intention to exorcise them, but rather to exalt them…’

The exhibition also includes a series of original drawings by the artist entitled Exil. The series develops a motif that entered his artistic language in 1995 with his neon of the same name. A poem has been specially written for this exhibition by Adonis, a poet with whom Adel Abdessemed has already made an artist’s book entitled Le Livre des AA (Yvon Lambert, 2015), as well as a book of correspondence, La peau du chaos (Actes Sud, 2015. The poem is called L’océan du réel (‘The Ocean of Reality’) and will be presented for the first time at the gallery.

With ‘Politics of Drawing’, the artist has deployed all his virtuosity to invite us to ‘a continual, emotional, spiritual and naked movement for the protection of life’, an interrogation of our humanity and a ‘reflection upon the present state of the world’. The drawings are therefore presented ‘not as fixed reflections, but in movement…’

To accompany the exhibition, the Cahiers d’Art revue will feature an essay by Daniel Birnbaum (Moderna Museet, Stockholm) on the work of Adel Abdessemed.

Exploring the potential of photography besides its document form, Liz Deschenes produces unique, site-specific work that reflects on the medium in expansive terms. Liz Deschenes' work has been increasingly concerned with the interaction between the history of a site, its possibilities of display and the viewer’s awareness of his or her own perceptual and physical experience in the space.

For her presentation at Campoli Presti, Liz Deschenes will make an intervention in the new gallery space at 4 rue de Braque with a photographic installation. The geometrical shape and angled frame of the silvertoned photograms mark the space in different segments and open up new reading directions, both of the artwork and the architecture that surrounds it. Freestanding paneled works from this series have first been presented at the Walker Art Center in 2014, where Deschenes’ works echoed different architectural features of the Walker's 1971 building, especially the stairs that take visitors from one gallery to the building's outdoor terraces. For Deschenes’ year-long installation at MassMOCA in 2015, translucent acrylic panels made the elements relate to one another and multiply angles of view.

Liz Deschenes’ work is part of the permanent collections of Centre Pompidou, Paris; MoMA, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; The Art Institute of Chicago; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C; Corcoran Museum of Art, Washington D.C. and CCS Bard Hessel Museum, Annandale-on Hudson. Deschenes has a current survey exhibition at the ICA Boston with an accompanying monograph. She recently had solo exhibitions at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (2014); at MASSMoCA, North Adams (2015) and at Secession, Vienna (2012-2013). Deschenes’ work is currently on view at the Centre Pompidou, Paris in Collected by Thea Westreich Wagner and Ethan Wagner travelling from the Whitney Museum, New York. Past exhibitions include Sites of Reason: A Selection of Recent Acquisitions at MoMA, New York; the Whitney Biennial 2012 and Parcours at the Art Institute of Chicago with Florian Pumhösl (2013).

Campoli Presti is pleased to announce the first solo exhibition of works by Sarah Charlesworth at the gallery. Selected by Liz Deschenes, the works are displayed in the ground floor of 6 rue de Braque.

Charlesworth’s influential body of work deconstructed the conventions of photography and established the medium's centrality in our perception of the world. Like contemporaries Laurie Simmons, Cindy Sherman, Jack Goldstein, Barbara Kruger, and Richard Prince, Charlesworth was later associated with the heterogeneous group of conceptual artists identified as Pictures Generation. Charlesworth stages volatile worlds, isolating objects on monochrome backgrounds to reveal the constructed nature of visual culture and question systems of image distribution.

For the exhibition at Campoli Presti, Liz Deschenes has selected works from Charlesworth's 0+1 series and one work from the Neverland series. Single objects that count as visual fetishes (an altar, a tree, a skull) are surrendered to gravity and are exposed to a vaporous light that makes them simultaneously appear and recede. Their fragile existence responds to the uncertain economy of images, which can either accelerate their reproduction or make them disappear over time. Rendered in polished lacquer wooden frames, each image is meticulously cut and re-photographed, contributing to the theatricality of their presentation.

Sarah Charlesworth was born in 1947 in East Orange, New Jersey, and passed away in 2013 in Falls Village, Connecticut. She has been the subject of solo exhibitions at a number of institutions, including a solo survey exhibition at New Museum, New York (2015) and a retrospective organized by SITE Santa Fe (1997), which traveled to the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego (1998); the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, DC (1998); and the Cleveland Center for Contemporary Art (1999). Charlesworth’s Stills series was recently completed and presented for the first time at the Art Institute of Chicago (2014). Her work has been included in numerous group exhibitions, including the 77th Whitney Biennial, the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2014); Shock the News, National Gallery of Art, Washington DC (2012); Signs of a Struggle: Photography in the Wake of Postmodernism, the Victoria and Albert Museum, London (2011); September 11, the Museum of Modern Art, New York (2011); The Last Newspaper, the New Museum, New York (2010); The Pictures Generation, 1974–1984, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2009); and The Last Picture Show: Artists Using Photography 1960-1982, the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (2004).

Charlesworth taught photography for many years at the School of the Visual Arts, New York; the Rhode Island School of Design, Providence; and Princeton University, NJ.

Liz Deschenes’ work is part of the permanent collections of Centre Pompidou, Paris; MoMA, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; The Art Institute of Chicago; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C; Corcoran Museum of Art, Washington D.C. and CCS Bard Hessel Museum, Annandale-on Hudson. Deschenes has a current survey exhibition at the ICA Boston with an accompanying monograph. She recently had solo exhibitions at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (2014); at MASSMoCA, North Adams (2015) and at Secession, Vienna (2012-2013). Deschenes’ work is currently on view at the Centre Pompidou, Paris in Collected by Thea Westreich Wagner and Ethan Wagner travelling from the Whitney Museum, New York. Past exhibitions include Sites of Reason: A Selection of Recent Acquisitions at MoMA, New York; the Whitney Biennial 2012 and Parcours at the Art Institute of Chicago with Florian Pumhösl (2013).

« To walk through his door didn’t mean wandering into a fringe world, it meant crossing the threshold of another world » Bourgeade wrote regarding Pierre Molinier, a tutelary figure of this exhibition.

This « other world » is that of self-eroticism, of personality games, of the domestic space as a theatre for the most intimate fantasies. In this space, all variations are conceivable, the roles aren’t as set as they are on the outside : in the shadowy light of the home, reality can reflect many surprises.

Pierre Molinier (1900 - 1976), of course, is a cornerstone of this adventure into the « other world ». This pioneer of body-art, this virtuoso of photomontages mixing up identities, is here accompanied by an imaginary double, Marcel Bascoulard (1913 - 1978), the bum from Bourges. As he was 18 years old, he witnessed his father’s murder by his beloved mother. His entire life, he refused to « work », living in makeshift homes and spending his days studying (railway engineering, geography, the history of women’s fashion…) and drawing obsessively deserted views of the city, transformed under his pen, into a morbid and ghostly territory. From a good-looking teenager to a coarse-featured middle-aged man, Marcel Bascoulard repeatedly took self portraits in women’s clothing, usually skillfully designed by him, using pre-determined « poses », each duly archived.

These « transformed self-portraits » by Molinier and Bascoulard introduce, in the exhibition, an entire section attributed to « photographs of identities », plural, bringing together Morton Bartlett’s or Hans Bellmer’s illustrated fantasies using dolls and mannequins, those of Julien Carreyn, John Kayser, Miroslav Tichy, claiming as their own the images of more or less consenting accomplices, those of Eugene Von Bruenchenhein changing his wife Marie into a household pinup, using Christmas decorations, or those of Michel Journiac, playing incest scenes with his parents.

Finally, Sexe au Logis (Phonetic wordplay with « Sexology », literally meaning « Sex in one’s dwellings »), a plea for an assertive and ever-present sexuality, blossoms in the gallery’s great nave. One of Hélène Delprat’s monumental paintings presides, filled with artificial creatures destined to solitary pleasures, next to large black and white Betty Tompkins, a penetration cinema close-up, and to images of pin-ups slipped from the internet and captured by Roe Etheridge and Thomas Ruff’s lenses.

All in all, through these various « stations », Uniques en leurs genres offers to explore the implications of Jacques Lacan’s statement : « we are all agreed that love is a form of suicide ».

This exhibition, showcasing Marcel Bascoulard’s photographic self-portraits, is a true event since it is the first time these images are gathered and shown. Their unlikely realization, an almost unique case of art brut photography, as well as their serendipitous preservation, that we owe to the memory filled benevolence of a few local families, is nothing short of a miracle. This exhilarating discovery allows us to share the marvelous vision of a fiercely unhindered creator, whose imaginary world is as mysterious as it is wonderful.

Bascoulard was a well-known character in Bourges, his memory is still very much alive, in a very touching manner, in many locals’ minds, especially to those who crossed his path as they were children. The relationship between Bascoulard and the locals, a subtle mix between fascination and distrust, seemed to suit the artist perfectly as he was in most part responsible for this dynamic. Even though he would drive off the occasional onlooker who ventured to watch him draw, he’d generously and happily distribute his photographic self portraits.

Bascoulard’s drawing are unanimously acclaimed both by the local, flattered in his appeal to regional heritage, and the amateur who remains fascinated by the precision and meticulousness of the strokes that lead him out of this world. The same cannot be said of his photographs. It is obvious that a man dressed-up as a woman isn’t appropriate. However, all parties agree to state that these images, though distorting reality, do not provoke nor offend the spectator as they are void of any sexual intent.

Bascoulard’s drawings are completely deserted of any human figure. Its only representation therefore remains in the photographic self-portraits. These images try to reach an ideal, a « How I wished I could be », or even a how I wished the world could be, since I cannot or wish not see it the way it is. Thus Bascoulard creates his own fantasy character, a fairytale hero, looming up, as in a dream, from ramshackle backyards or amidst wasteland puddles. A subtle tenderness, a generous and protective sweetness, an emotional, almost maternal ideal emerges from these small icons with strange and magical qualities, which Bascoulard will distribute like holy cards.

Bascoulard started his photographic series in 1942, the desire to escape the bleak everyday life during the French occupation might have something to do with it, but their realization will always be prone to the greatest precariousness. The fact he kept on going until he died in 1978 is astounding, as is the permanency of this meticulous obsession that will have him number his poses, register the date and time of each shot, and even the locations however unlikely.

The clothes, what a fashion lesson ! come in an abundant variety. Bascoulard designed his outfits but had them made by seamstresses or even, sublime bizarreness, by orphans in an apprentice school. No piece of clothing remains unfortunately. The dresses are the only moult vectors, Bascoulard doesn’t wear make-up nor does he try to change his face features, his hair, a bum’s privilege, are at best tamed.

Final paradox, on almost all photographs, he holds a mirror - or a piece of mirror to be exact - in his right hand. Strange fact for someone who doesn’t care about how his face looks, but a fabulous metaphor for the reflected image, the essence of photography, a photography whose meaning he instinctively and masterfully grasped to give us these frail images, an enchanting yet tangible dream of his « other world ».

Farideh Cadot is pleased to announce Noël Cuin's personal exhibition which will take place from the 21st of October to the 21st of December 2016 within the space at 7 rue Notre-Dame de Nazareth in Paris, 3rd arrondissement.

This new exhibition at the gallery mingles older and recent works. However, without presenting a retrospective, Noël Cuin proposes an ambivalent conversation between past and present, privileging the timeless and the anachronic. Like a musical suite without a logical sequence, the artist expresses ideas which come and go in his work: “elder sisters of my current concerns or a light cast upon my recent proposals, my recent thoughts? Traces in a succession of firsts, or landmarks found in my reserve?”

Presence and silence, shadow and light, gravity and lightness, are part of the concerns which animate his practice, navigating between painting, drawing and objects. His work as a whole, shown through twenty artworks, reveals different feelings and levels of interpretation with each new reading, with a minimalist approach which always seeks to purify and seek the essence of a work: “…/… in the painting of my glass, in my drawings or volumes, there is always this recurring desire to consider them like an emptiness that may be seen (just as the composer considers a silence that may be heard).”

Noël Cuin is born in 1949 in Bordeaux, where he lives and works. His work has been shown in major institutions such as the Musée d’Art Contemporain of Bordeaux (1977), UCLA in Los Angeles (1985), the Fondation Miro in Barcelona (1986) and the FRAC Aquitaine (1992). His works are part of the collections of the CAPC and FRAC Aquitaine in Bordeaux, of the Musée d'art moderne de la Ville de Paris and the Caisse des Dépôts et des Consignations, as well as numerous private collections in France and Europe.